A growing number of businesses use call centers to handle interactions with customers. The call centers use groups of agents to handle all inbound and outbound calls. Companies typically use call center services, for example, as a help desk for banks, service providers, and others, or to manage outbound and inbound communication campaigns to potential customers for telemarketing or to existing customers for collecting information or customer follow-up.
In a call center, there may thus be numerous incoming lines and a number of call center agents ready to answer the incoming calls. To efficiently answer incoming telephone calls, the incoming calls are placed in a queue and answered by a call center agent, typically after a waiting period, and likewise for outbound calls.
To increase the efficiency of the call center agents, typically a caller is asked to enter information, such as telephone number, account information, etc., before the call is transferred to the call center agent. The caller may also be transferred to post-processing of the call, e.g. to provide an evaluation of the quality of the service the call center agent provided. Furthermore, a call may be monitored for quality, supervision or training purposes.
The call center management software implementing the call center may be very complex and multifunctional, however, typically, standard phones or headsets are connected to the call center software for the agents to communicate via the call center management software and the routing of inbound and outbound calls is typically implemented using basic circuit switching.
The call center agents and the call center management software typically communicates using the call states of the telephone, such as the hook states of a standard desk phone, an IP telephone system, etc. being connected to or forming part of the call center management software. Using the hook states, the call center management software may distribute further calls to agents e.g. as soon as the state switches from “hook off”, i.e. busy, to “hook on”, i.e. available.
In call centers, headsets may be advantageous for the call center agents, to allow for e.g. simultaneous use of a computer system, however, answer delay times may be increased.